14.9. An i-bay Used as Your Customer Download Site

When customers hire The Pagan Vegan to plan events, they need to review a great deal of information - menu options, catalogues from various vendors for event stationary, table-setting rentals, etc. Often customers want several days to review it all. TPV has only a limited number of catalogues for loan, so it decided to provide customers with access to this information online. To accomplish this, TPV created a download i-bay, called "menus", where customers can download the catalogue files themselves and view the contents on their desktop machines.

TPV set the i-bay for Administrator-only write access, viewable over the entire Internet, with no password required. A customer accesses the site using the FTP client in their web browser to login as the i-bay user name by entering the URL ftp://menus@ftp.tofu-dog.com . This is what the customer sees:

When the cursor is placed over a file name, the full name of the file appears. To download a particular file, the customer simply clicks on the file name. A browser window allows the customer to select a destination directory for the file on his or her local hard drive.